Great leap forward

The American journalist Lincoln Steffens (1866 to 1936) traveled to the then Soviet Union between 1919 and 1921 and reported euphorically on Marxism-Leninism:

"I have seen the future and it works."

Did Hasso Plattner feel the same way when he roamed Silicon Valley and saw all the splendors of Apple, Facebook and Google? Are these cloud-based business models the future for Plattner?

For Lincoln Steffens, the collective farms - the large-scale agricultural enterprises of the Soviet Union - were the blessed land and the glorious future.

The historical development shows something different: It is necessary to distinguish between technical feasibility, fashion trends and sustainability.

SAP has interesting cloud solutions, but not everything that is technically feasible also makes economic sense. At the moment, SAP is paying an extremely high price to live out the fad of cloud computing - new megatrends will come and, in the absence of a strategy, a new discussion will then begin again.

SAP will fail with cloud computing because other IT companies are naturally faster, more agile, leaner or bigger - watch out for the scale effect!

However, this does not mean that SAP software is not suitable for cloud computing. There are successful installations of ERP/ECC 6.0 Business Suite 7 with numerous cloud providers.

The only thing hardly anyone wants is the Hana Enterprise Cloud. The efforts and investments that SAP has been making for years are bringing little back.

SAP has entered into a comparison and competition with Google, Amazon and Microsoft that can only end in SAP's disadvantage due to the size ratios - and further danger now threatens at the other end of the cloud scale:

Siemens, Bosch, Atos and others are building specialized industrial clouds for IoT and M2M. These Industry 4.0 clouds will not start a price battle with SAP's cloud offering. But they are more specialized than HEC and HCP and thus probably better suited for digital transformation.

SAP should know this, because with Hybris it has a similarly highly specialized product on offer - and it is successful with it. Ariba, Concur and SuccessFactors satisfy SAP's quantitative cloud growth. But you pay a crazy high price for it.

SAP seems to be blind:

But with a big leap forward, they want to establish not only cloud computing by 2020, but also S/4 and Hana by 2025.

The "Great Leap Forward" was the name of a campaign initiated by Mao Zedong that ran from 1958 to 1961. With the help of this campaign, the three major differences - countryside and city, head and hand, and industry and agriculture - were to be leveled out, and the gap to the western industrialized countries was to be closed.

The SAP project appears similar: The differences between on-premise and on-demand, between licenses and subscriptions, and between software modules (incl. version changes) and app development (continuous improvement) must be eliminated.

From SAP's point of view, the future is reduced to Hana, S/4 and cloud computing - not much when you know the heterogeneity of the global SAP community and the diverging wishes of SAP's existing customers.

Twice the project of unification and uniformity failed, once in the collective farms of the Soviet Union and once in Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.

In 1961, the campaign was abandoned in China after its obvious failure.